The rising cost of fossil fuel and its uncertain availability in conjunction with the rising cost of landfill disposal of debris has made it economically and ecologically feasible to reclaim used wood from debris produced by demolition of buildings and other structures for reuse as fuel.
Processes for reclaiming used wood from debris are known in the art. Most commonly, the raw debris is introduced into a sink float tank in order to effect separation of floating combustible material such as wood from heavier non-burnable materials such as metal or bricks. The known processes that use sink float tanks have several disadvantages. Firstly, the sink float tanks can only be used on certain types of debris that contain a small proportion of heavier debris relative to the wood debris. Furthermore, the heavier debris must be in relatively small pieces. In order for the tanks to receive large pieces, the size of the tank must increase dramatically. Often, reclamation centers use multiple numbers of large tanks to match capacity with the other reclamation apparatus. The large tanks take up a large amount of space and also use large quantities of water in a relatively short period of time.
What is needed is a process and apparatus which efficiently reclaims used wood from demolition debris but which eliminates the need for multiple number of large tanks so that wood reclamation can be accomplished in a facility of reduced size. What is also needed is a reclaiming process that operates on a reduced amount of water.